OpenAI and Anthropic launched competing flagship AI models within an hour of each other, highlighting intense competition for enterprise contracts. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 showed strengths in legal and financial reasoning, while OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex excelled in agentic coding benchmarks. The releases come as investors reassess traditional software firms amid concerns that AI-native platforms could disrupt established enterprise tools.
The near-simultaneous unveiling of new AI models by OpenAI and Anthropic underscored the rapid iteration in the race for corporate customers. Both companies are pushing to secure long-term contracts with large enterprises.
Anthropic said its Claude Opus 4.6 model delivers gains in long-context reasoning and professional tasks. The company cited a 1-million-token context window and a 76% score on the MRCR v2 benchmark for complex information retrieval.
Shortly afterward, OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex, a model optimized for agentic coding and research. OpenAI stated Codex scored 77.3% on the Terminal-Bench 2.0 coding benchmark, outperforming Claude Opus 4.6’s 65.4%.
Benchmark results suggest the models are optimized for different strengths. Claude Opus 4.6 showed stronger performance on finance and legal tasks, while GPT-5.3 Codex led in agentic coding tests and efficiency metrics.
The releases contributed to investor concerns about traditional software providers. Shares of several information and professional-services firms fell amid worries that AI platforms could erode demand for established enterprise tools.
Neither model holds a clear overall lead, with advantages depending on whether enterprises prioritize professional reasoning or autonomous software development. Google is also expected to roll out updates to its Gemini models soon, adding to the competitive pace.
Benchmark results alone are unlikely to determine market leadership. Broader adoption and enterprise deployment will increasingly shape the competitive landscape.
